| Date: 15 April 2011, 07:05
|
So, AN AUTHOR'S intro for the omnibus edition, eh? Never one to shirk the task of talking about my
writing and waxing lyrical on just how much thought needs to go into seemingly mindless violence,
here is the Complete and Utter History of the Last Chancers. Bear with me, it goes on for a bit...
I make no great claims of originality concerning the Last Chancers. In fact, their creation and
development can be credited to many people. Anyway, let's do this properly and start at the
beginning.
Years ago, when I were but a youthful assistant games developer for Games Workshop, we were
working on the Codex: Imperial Guard supplement for the Warhammer 40,000 game. Another
assistant games developer, Ian Pickstock, and I were tasked with creating a 'special character' - a
famous (or infamous) named individual.
We came up with the idea of a famous squad, rather than a single person, based on the special
forces 'men-on-a-mission' platoon as seen in many action movies. So Major Schaeffer (the real name
of Arnie's character in Predator) was created, along with a squad of ultra-tough hombres with their
specialist skills and weaponry.
This was passed on to Rick Priestley, the main author of the codex, who is from a different moviegoing
generation to Ian and myself, and thus moved the squad into a frame of reference he found
more familiar - the Dirty Dozen. Schaeffer was promoted to a colonel, and the squad became
members of the 13th Penal Legion.
Now, penal legions were real - both the Germans and Soviets made use of them during World War II,
mainly for mine clearance and other such unenviable jobs. In the early iterations of the Warhammer
40,000 universe, through the Rogue Trader game, penal legions had been established as part of the
Imperial Guard. However, this being the unforgiving Imperium of Man, these penal legions were
human bombs, fitted with explosive collars to ensure discipline or, at a pinch, blow up the enemy!
Rick wanted to move the penal legions into a slightly more heroic light for this version of the game, so
our men-on-a-mission were hijacked and the Last Chancers were born.
|
DISCLAIMER:
This site does not store Last Chancers on its server. We only index and link to Last Chancers provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete Last Chancers if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
|
 |
|
Comments (0)
All
